With the explosive growth of data and the breakneck pace of digitization, mainstream financial service providers (FSPs) are increasingly turning to new and alternative data sources and analytics tools to more efficiently reach emerging markets and help bring the world’s 1.7 billion underserved people into the formal financial system. This “new data,” largely separate from traditional credit bureau data, represents a tremendous opportunity for commercial banks to identity new customers, many of whom were previously “credit invisible,” and to better understand and serve the needs of their existing client base. However, the path to greater data utilization is not always clear, as FSPs must weigh the benefits of embracing a data-centric approach with significant operational challenges, including changing a risk-adverse banking culture, recruiting top technical talent, upgrading legacy IT infrastructure and navigating a complex regulatory environment. Building upon in-depth interviews with banks, fintechs and other actors, Accelerating Financial Inclusion with New Data—the newest joint report from the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion (CFI) and the Institute of International Finance (IIF), supported by MetLife Foundation—examines the data landscape and evaluates the progress FSPs have made in innovating around data and areas where they have faced obstacles. Read the rest of this entry »

This week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Verizon announced that it’s unveiling new 5G wireless connectivity for its mobile customers. More “G”s are not a surprising announcement, as mobile networks strut their speed at this annual event like body builders at a weightlifting competition. For those unfamiliar with what exactly 5G means, the network will provide speeds of a gigabit per second and faster, but only in a select group of cities in high income economies.

As we celebrate global innovation, we can also take a moment to highlight those who continue to have limited to no connectivity—with implications for global development. While 5G revs up, an astounding number of people are left out of mobile connectivity and therefore mobile money—even in countries known for their digital financial services uptake.

Our CFI Fellow Leon Perlman examines this phenomenon in his upcoming report. As a sneak preview, in his report Leon shows connectivity maps in a select group of emerging markets, such as the one above. Take this example of Tanzania, a market with growing mobile money usage. In this market, mobile network coverage misses large swaths of rural areas toward the center of the country. Certainly, those areas have lower population densities than other areas, but they are home to many people. The mobile financial services ecosystem depends on connectivity infrastructure that provides reliable and sufficiently high-speed data transmission. Lacking that, people in rural areas are left out in large numbers. In the map above, the blue splotches indicate mobile network coverage, and the dots are where mobile money agents are located.

What’s better than reading about data? Visualizing it! Pardon us, then, as we offer a few words on CFI and MIX’s new FI2020 Inclusion Visualizer, a powerful tool to manipulate, visualize, and download images of data related to financial inclusion.

The Inclusion Visualizer, harnessing publicly available data from the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Economist Intelligence Unit, and others, allows users to explore financial inclusion topics across country, region, and income levels. For the adventurous, users are able to customize the range of visualized categories and sub-categories. For example, do you want to know what percent of women with a primary school education or less have their own account at a financial institution? The Visualizer also offers targeted navigation options that focus on key areas, like the financial inclusion infrastructure, the policy environment, and technology.

How to Get the Most Out of the FI2020 Inclusion Visualizer

To get a better understanding of the landscape of financial inclusion around the globe, we suggest you begin by exploring Sections 1A through 1F. One particularly interesting section is Account Ownership (IC) because this metric is, perhaps, the simplest method for measuring financial access. Financial Inclusion Over Time (1B) illustrates changes not only in account ownership, but also with financial activities related to credit, savings, withdrawals, and deposits. As you’ll see, the world has seen growth in all of these activities with the exceptions of withdrawals and deposits, which implies that greater effort is needed on a global scale to increase usage of accounts.

How has Latin America and the Caribbean’s (LAC) market at the base of the pyramid (BoP) changed during recent years? Tuesday, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) released a new report exploring this question. Among the findings, the research revealed that the BoP market (those living on less than $10 per day) has grown 22 percent in a decade, going from $623 billion in 2000 to $759 billion in 2010. This increase wasn’t the result of demographic changes, but of economic growth. The per capita income among the BoP in the region increased at 2 percent annually across the decade, while that of the overall population remained relatively constant. What does this mean? A lot of things, including that there is a growing opportunity for companies to offer products and services to this population segment that have long been unavailable to them.

The report presents information on the size of the BoP market, its social-economic characteristics, market segments, consumer preferences, spending patterns, and demand-related factors. The report also looks at the supply side of the BoP market and analyzes the types of business models, distribution channels, and input sources that have successfully engaged this population segment.

Since the release of our paper, Aging and Financial Inclusion: An Opportunity, I have been considering the challenge of market segmentation using the life course. This is not unexplored terrain at the Center for Financial Inclusion. Beth Rhyne articulated a life course approach during our Looking Through the Demographic Window project, which we have captured in the infographic embedded at right. I have been hearing from microfinance institutions that some efforts are underway to segment clients by their life stage, though this remains a relatively untouched area in the industry. For a great example of segmentation, however, I only had to look to the spam filter on my email.

Most of the emails that get caught in my spam filter are about body image. I receive messages advertising dieting pills, on the one quick fix to reduce belly fat (you won’t believe which celebrities use it!), and how to get toned abs within a week. This makes sense—I work out regularly, and I (try to) watch what I eat. The emails are tailored to me.

In chatting with my colleagues, I find that they also receive targeted emails. Some women in our office who are older than me receive emails for walk-in tubs. Singles get emails that point them to dating websites. Some of the younger men in our office get emails that refer to “satisfying” their girlfriends. And the spam filters of older men in our office collect emails about (ahem) performance-enhancing pills.

These are, of course, gross generalizations—the life course cannot possibly be reduced to dieting, walk-in tubs, and bedroom performance. But why is it that the email caught in my spam filter is more skilled at customer segmentation using the life course than my financial institution’s product line? Even more than being successful at segmenting a potential client base, spam marketers are successful at moving this potential client base to action, according to MailChimp. They have a simple message and a call to action. Their “click rates,” or the rate at which people click on links, are higher than average.

Participants in a workshop on aging and financial inclusion, organized by the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion and HelpAge, held last week in New York City at MetLife.

When we wrote about the topic of aging in our recently-released paper Aging and Financial Inclusion: An Opportunity, I have to admit that I was skeptical that any stakeholders would be motivated to action — regardless of how compelling the paper was. Aging, I thought, is something people feel uncomfortable talking about, whether because they worry about their own old age, or that of their parents, or because they consider older people an uninteresting market segment. Whatever the reason, I was worried that our effort to call attention to this issue would fizzle out and fade into the internet abyss.

I was thrilled to be proved wrong.

Last week, discussing the new paper in our various meetings in Washington, D.C. and in New York City and in a global webinar, we learned that much more is happening in this area than we had initially known, and that more people are willing to consider what aging may mean in their own work than we expected.

Last week Aging and Financial Inclusion: An Opportunity was released, a new FI2020 report from CFI and HelpAge International supported by MetLife Foundation. The report examines the unmet financing needs of older adults, an area of increasing importance as global demographic shifts see the rapid expansion of this population segment. Within 25 years, the percent of the world’s population over age 60 will nearly double.

As part of the report’s launch, HelpAge International’s Head of Policy Eppu Mikkonen-Jeanneret, MetLife Foundation’s Financial Inclusion Lead Evelyn Stark, and CFI’s Managing Director Elisabeth Rhyne sat down to discuss the project and its findings. The conversation, among its topics, touched on the scale of the demographic shifts at hand, the opportunities in these changes, where we are with pension services, and action areas for policymakers, providers, and support organizations.

Marisol is a 69-year-old woman in Aguablanca, a mid-sized community near the coast in Colombia. She hasn’t saved much for her older years. She receives a small social pension—about a dollar per day—from the public pension program, Colombia Mayor. While it provides an income floor for her, Marisol would like to be working as an entrepreneur. She even has a plan: “If I had a little capital, I could buy chicken legs, beef, and bananas here at a cheap price and then sell them in the Pacific towns at three or four times the price. And then I could bring back fish from the coast to sell here at the fairs.” But she cannot get a loan because of the age caps on credit at the financial institutions that operate in her area.

Marisol explains that it is not her lack of zeal or a declining health that is keeping her from increasing her income through this business dream of hers. “Strength and desire do not fail me,” she says. “It’s the money that I lack.”

Marisol was one of the people that we interviewed as part of the creation of an issue paper on Aging and Financial Inclusion, a project conducted by the Financial Inclusion 2020 campaign and in collaboration with HelpAge International. Her story is not unique—many older people report being denied access to credit and insurance in their later years. Most older people who had low or informal income when they were younger have not saved for their older years.

The new paper examines the unmet financing needs of older adults, a population segment growing rapidly in developing countries. With a focus on Latin America, the paper discusses the barriers to and market opportunities in expanding financial access to aging populations.

Recently, Dean Karlan published an article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review titled “The Next Stage of Financial Inclusion.” The key points of his article are that while non-profits led the way in developing microcredit for the poor and started the movement for financial inclusion, for-profit companies have increasingly found it worth their while to offer financial services for the base of the pyramid. The entrance of new players to the market, Karlan offers, is a testament to the success of the early microfinance-focused non-profits. However, Karlan suggests that non-profits still have an important role in continuing to innovate in the financial services space. We agree. This is particularly true for extending financial services to people that banks still consider unprofitable: “the too rural, the too poor and the too young.” We would add disabled populations and the “too old.”

CFI and HelpAge’s New Research Initiative Examines the Financial Needs of Older Persons

> Posted by Eric Zuehlke, Web and Communications Director, CFI

Proportion of the Population that is Elderly (click to enlarge)

A few years ago, my 90-year-old grandfather moved from Japan, where he had lived his entire life, to live with my parents in Virginia. Although he was retired and living comfortably, the death of my grandmother left him without an adequate support system. With his healthy pension and public assistance from the Japanese government, mixed with the security of living with my parents, he is well cared for. I’d say he is financially included. But on a global scale, he’s one of the lucky ones. All his supports – close family, a pension, good health care, and insurance – are inadequate for many. And the need for appropriate services is growing.

The facts speak for themselves. Between 2010-2020, the population of older persons will almost double in middle-income countries and increase by 40 percent worldwide. Yet despite this growing population, the provision of financial services is woefully inadequate. One in four older people in low and middle-income countries do not have a pension, and most pensions are inadequate to meet individual needs. Not only are financial services lacking, we don’t even fully understand financial inclusion in older age. The mismatch between the scale of the need and the attention devoted to it is staggering.

Founding Sponsor

Credit Suisse is a founding sponsor of the Center for Financial Inclusion. The Credit Suisse Group Foundation looks to its philanthropic partners to foster research, innovation and constructive dialogue in order to spread best practices and develop new solutions for financial inclusion.

Note

The views and opinions expressed on this blog, except where otherwise noted, are those of the authors and guest bloggers and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Center for Financial Inclusion or its affiliates.